Do you spend an inordinate amount of your online time clicking on pictures, videos, and stories about abused, homeless, ill, or injured animals? If you do, you may be suffering from an addiction to “grief porn!”

Emotionally manipulative (and unafraid!), you know you will be a wreck after you click on the tale of that brave, homeless kitty or a beloved pet’s last day on Earth, you know it is going to haunt you… but you click anyway, and are of course utterly destroyed by it (yet somehow, between sobs, you manage to share it with all your friends, too).

And if you’re like a lot of people, the next day, you repeat the cycle.

Not sad enough! We need more clicks!

Being affected like this is nothing to be ashamed of. We have empathy; we are heartbroken and outraged when animals are mistreated (this is why so many animal rights campaigns are long on images and short on facts). There are also at least 101 variations on the “Don’t trust a man who doesn’t like dogs/animals” theme out there — caring for animals is part of being human, and if you don’t, you are suspect. So it makes sense — but animal “grief porn” seems to becoming more and more common. What does the growth mean? According to the author of the article:

I get a sense that our sharing of grief porn amps up in times when much of the world events and politics are betraying our basic human beliefs of kindness and how we should treat others.

And perhaps we are clicking and sharing sad stories about animals at a rapid rate, in order to prove that we’re still compassionate — even though we are struggling to prove it in any kind of practical, tangible or political way.